{"id":616,"date":"2015-04-10T23:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T23:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/?p=616"},"modified":"2015-04-11T10:58:26","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T10:58:26","slug":"snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html","title":{"rendered":"Snowden had to act because the government was too slow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Le vrai Citoyen pr\u00e9f\u00e8re l’avantage g\u00e9n\u00e9ral \u00e0 son avantage.<\/em><\/p>\n

The true Citizen prefers\u00a0everyone’s benefit over his own benefit<\/p>\n

Jean-Jacques Rousseau<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Oliver Stone may direct a thriller\u00a0called Snowden<\/em>, telling the heroic story of the whistleblower.\u00a0In anticipation of it, I sought to read Luke Harding’s\u00a0The Snowden Files<\/em>\u00a0(2014)\u00a0–\u00a0the main source for the film –\u00a0in hope of producing a good quality review for publication.<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Poster for “Citizenfour”, the\u00a0award-winning documentary film by Laura Poitras,\u00a0one of Snowden’s first media contacts<\/em><\/p>\n

Snowden’s story, and the story of the journalists who took significant risks to aid him,\u00a0is one that cannot be ignored, especially by the majority of the youth whose formative politics are largely shaped on the Internet.\u00a0Snowden is recognized to be part of a\u00a0new\u00a0political generation fundamentally challenging an unwieldy and rigid state,\u00a0and possibly the first such challenger to have become a “leader” and a household name. If Snowden’s philosophy and actions reveal anything, it is that modern liberal states have all become too slow and clogged with corruption to make any promises of social change. Barack Obama is an example of that problem. As enlightened as he may be as a man, as a politician he is nothing but a useless, obstructing person to change in America. This was the view of Snowden, and it convinced him that only taking the initiative personally could really shake up the system and force it to reform. This was\u00a0a stunning success, with Obama only conceding that the debate was “overdue” after the leaks made public the scale of the US government’s indiscriminate surveillance of its citizens.<\/p>\n

Still, the Obama administration continues to do nothing about the crisis facing civil liberties in the US, just as it has continually failed to close Guantanamo Bay as it promised. Obama has also astonishingly gotten the US involved in even more wars than George W. Bush did. America had a chance to move beyond torture, military aggression, and other abuses that its government carried out\u00a0in the paranoid climate after the 9\/11 attacks, yet Obama did nothing. Even the Senate’s torture report was too little too late. Not only was it released after innocent people had already died or been driven basically insane\u00a0by their treatment at the hands of the US government, but most of the facts about it are still classified to protect US “national security”.<\/p>\n

“National security”\u00a0has\u00a0historically been\u00a0used to defend many horrible things, including war crimes and authoritarianism. However, it is only in recent years that the arguments have been used to justify to censoring the truth on the grounds that truth is harmful in its own right. This is what the argument against revealing the full details of the US government’s torture program amounts to. The idea that the US government should be allowed to shield the public from the truth because it might harm “national security” admits to the fraudulence of the idea of national security itself. National security is supposed to refer to protecting the “nation” – a body of associates usually\u00a0with a common heritage who have consented together to form a country, but\u00a0the whole idea can be discredited as Nineteenth Century nonsense<\/a>. Even if we go by the Nineteenth Century understanding of it, it is clear that hiding the truth from the nation doesn’t create security for\u00a0the nation at all, but causes the nation to\u00a0die.<\/p>\n

How can any group of people\u00a0survive, if information essential to their\u00a0lives and revealing\u00a0why their mortal enemies are attacking them\u00a0is being withheld from them? What the government is doing, by not disclosing the whole truth about torture or surveillance, is blindfolding the nation so\u00a0its own government can beat\u00a0it with a stick and whisper lies in its ear about “terrorists”. If a government\u00a0violates its\u00a0own constitution and the apparent rights given to the\u00a0citizens, and then blindfolds the people\u00a0so they don’t know the scale of the abuse, the government is undermining not just national security but the sovereignty of the people. We must remember that governments are not nations, nor do they have any sovereignty in their own right, so\u00a0for them to conflate their own security with “national” security is offensive to everyone who elected them.<\/p>\n

\n

By\u00a0Harry J. Bentham<\/a><\/p>\n

\"HJB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Le vrai Citoyen pr\u00e9f\u00e8re l’avantage g\u00e9n\u00e9ral \u00e0 son avantage. The true Citizen prefers\u00a0everyone’s benefit over his own benefit Jean-Jacques Rousseau Oliver Stone may direct a thriller\u00a0called Snowden, telling the heroic story of the whistleblower.\u00a0In anticipation of it, I sought to read Luke Harding’s\u00a0The Snowden Files\u00a0(2014)\u00a0–\u00a0the main source for the film –\u00a0in hope of producing a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,353,17,313,72,127,153,18,66,40,15,89],"tags":[1483,294,633,631,552,20,289,632,212,634,355,281,360,635],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antistatism","category-censorship","category-edward-snowden","category-entertainment","category-international-relations","category-journalism","category-lordre-2","category-nsa","category-politics-2","category-publishing","category-us","category-wikileaks","tag-edward-snowden","tag-guantanamo-bay","tag-laura-poitras","tag-luke-harding","tag-national-security","tag-nsa-2","tag-obama","tag-obamas-promises","tag-snowden","tag-snowden-film","tag-the-snowden-files","tag-torture-report","tag-us-government","tag-whistleblower"],"yoast_head":"\nSnowden had to act because the government was too slow - L'Ordre<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Snowden had to act because the government was too slow - L'Ordre\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Le vrai Citoyen pr\u00e9f\u00e8re l’avantage g\u00e9n\u00e9ral \u00e0 son avantage. The true Citizen prefers\u00a0everyone’s benefit over his own benefit Jean-Jacques Rousseau Oliver Stone may direct a thriller\u00a0called Snowden, telling the heroic story of the whistleblower.\u00a0In anticipation of it, I sought to read Luke Harding’s\u00a0The Snowden Files\u00a0(2014)\u00a0–\u00a0the main source for the film –\u00a0in hope of producing a…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"L'Ordre\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-04-10T23:00:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-04-11T10:58:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/3\/37\/Citizenfour_poster.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Harry J. Bentham\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Snowden had to act because the government was too slow - L'Ordre","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Snowden had to act because the government was too slow - L'Ordre","og_description":"Le vrai Citoyen pr\u00e9f\u00e8re l’avantage g\u00e9n\u00e9ral \u00e0 son avantage. The true Citizen prefers\u00a0everyone’s benefit over his own benefit Jean-Jacques Rousseau Oliver Stone may direct a thriller\u00a0called Snowden, telling the heroic story of the whistleblower.\u00a0In anticipation of it, I sought to read Luke Harding’s\u00a0The Snowden Files\u00a0(2014)\u00a0–\u00a0the main source for the film –\u00a0in hope of producing a…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html","og_site_name":"L'Ordre","article_published_time":"2015-04-10T23:00:06+00:00","article_modified_time":"2015-04-11T10:58:26+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/3\/37\/Citizenfour_poster.jpg"}],"author":"Harry J. Bentham","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html","name":"Snowden had to act because the government was too slow - L'Ordre","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/3\/37\/Citizenfour_poster.jpg","datePublished":"2015-04-10T23:00:06+00:00","dateModified":"2015-04-11T10:58:26+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/#\/schema\/person\/576f5919c442d93e18909ed47628846e"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/3\/37\/Citizenfour_poster.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/3\/37\/Citizenfour_poster.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/04\/snowden-had-to-act-because-the-government-was-too-slow.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Snowden had to act because the government was too slow"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/","name":"L'Ordre","description":"Beliefnet Voices - Harry Bentham","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/#\/schema\/person\/576f5919c442d93e18909ed47628846e","name":"Harry J. Bentham","description":"Harry J. Bentham is a British futurist blogger who has been a contributor at a number of think tanks including the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies since 2013. His work at Press TV and the L'Ordre blog featured at the multi-faith Beliefnet website has gained increasing attention and praise, including in the international media. Commentaries on political and ethical controversies by Bentham have been published at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, H+ Magazine, Dissident Voice and numerous other publications. He edits The clubof.info Blog (http:\/\/www.clubof.info\/search\/label\/Harry_J_Bentham).","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Harry-J.-Bentham\/e\/B00D4MSEY0\/"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/author\/hbentham"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/577"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}